Oscar nominations 2013: Lincoln campaign pays off

• Lincoln leads race with 12 nominations
• Life of Pi trails with 11
• Silver Linings Playbook and Les Miserables each take eight, with Argo on seven
• Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty disappoint with five apiece; but joy for Amour which gets the same number

Steven Spielberg's biopic of the 16th president of the United States continues its apparently unstoppable progress towards Oscars glory. But a surprisingly eclectic selection of Oscar nominations threw some stones in its path today.

Life of Pi, Ang Lee's adaptation of the Yann Martel Booker winner came in second with 11 nominations, four of them in major categories, while David O Russell's screwball rom-com Silver Linings Playbook won nominations in eight categories, seven of them major – with surprise nods for supporting actors Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro. Les Miserables, Tom Hooper's epic adaptation of the musical smash, also won eight, just beating Ben Affleck's Argo (on seven).

There was more good news for Britain's Working Title with a surprise four nominations for Joe Wright's Anna Karenina. The studio's co-chairs Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan professed themselves "really proud" and said it was a "great start to the year".

But the much-talked-up surge for the record-breaking James Bond film Skyfall failed to materialise. It received five nods, including one for Adele's theme song, but none was in any of the main categories.

Quentin Tarantino's controversial Django Unchained and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, performed much less well than predicted; both earning just five.

That's the same number as went to Amour, Michael Haneke's austere drama about an elderly couple coping after one of them suffers a stroke. As well as a predicted nomination for best foreign film, Haneke's Palme d'Or winner is up for best picture, best director, best original screenplay and best actress. Emmanuelle Riva, 85, is the oldest ever contender in this category; she's up against the youngest ever – Quvenzhané Wallis, now 9, and the star of Beasts of the Southern Wild. That film also found unexpected favour with the Academy, winning four nominations – including one for best picture.

Benh Zeitlin, Michael Haneke and David O Russell's best director nods look to have pushed out Tom Hooper, Kathryn Bigelow and Quentin Tarantino, all of whom started the season looking the more likely picks.

And while the huge haul of 11 nods for Ang Lee's film were by and large accumulated by its technical team, the eight nominations for Russell's film were picked up mostly by its on-screen talent. It's the first film since Reds in 1982 to be nominated in all four acting categories.

Oscar host Seth Macfarlane and Amazing Spider-Man actor Emma Stone announced the nominations in a ceremony that began at 5.30am local time at the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles. Macfarlane, who might have been hoping for a clutch of nominations for his successful directing debut Ted, had to be content with a best original song nod for Everybody Needs a Best Friend for which he wrote the lyrics.

But he proved a funny and irreverent addition to the Oscar family, comparing himself to Donny Osmond, and telling the best supporting actress nominees: "Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein."

Weinstein, who is renowned as a master Oscar campaigner, and who piloted The Artist to success last year, said he was "blown away" by the nominations for his films, and he will no doubt be content with the result for Silver Linings, but less so for two others : Quentin Tarantino's violent slavery western Django Unchained and Paul Thomas Anderson's thinly-disguised Scientology drama The Master.

Lincoln had long been tipped as the Academy's likely recipient of the lion's share of its gongs; a prediction concretised when the film came out as the frontrunner for both the Baftas (where it leads the pack with 10 nominations) and the Golden Globes.

The two big upsets were the failure of Tarantino and Bigelow to break into the big categories. Tarantino's Django Unchained did well at the box office, taking more than $110m after two weeks on release in North America, and was the subject of early buzz.

Zero Dark Thirty was another early frontrunner that stumbled: Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal, may have been anticipating a rerun of their 2010 Oscar success with The Hurt Locker. Instead, the acrimony the film has attracted from both sides of the political spectrum – particularly in its alleged endorsement of CIA torture practices – may have proved toxic.

Conversely, the makers of two less heralded films will be delighted. Arguably the most heartwarming story of the entire awards season, the ascent of low-budget indie Beasts of the Southern Wild – via success at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals – to four nominations, including best picture, best director for Benh Zeitlin and best actress for nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis (the youngest ever in this category) is little short of miraculous.

Almost as remarkable are the five nominations for Michael Haneke's highly-charged chamber drama Amour. The Academy is notoriously ungenerous to non-English language films – the non-speaking Artist notwithstanding, the last properly foreign-language film to receive a best picture nod was the Clint Eastwood-directed Letters from Iwo Jima in 2007.

Philip Knatchbull, chief executive of Amour's UK distributors Curzon Artificial Eye, was understandably delighted at the boost the film has been given, saying it was "fantastic news" and that through "sheer quality of film-making … it is not only a commercial victory, but also a victory for cinematic excellence."

The announcement came two weeks earlier than customary, apparently to upstage the Golden Globes, whose awards ceremony is this weekend. It also cast a long shadow over the nominations for Britain's film awards, the Baftas, which were released on Wednesday. Nevertheless, both academies have largely agreed: Lincoln is the film to beat.

• This article was amended on 10 January 2013. The original said Reds had been nominated in all four acting categories in 1974. This has been corrected.